Talk about mixed feelings: having control over your medical records, and having them in the cloud so that you don’t have to worry about paper trails or losing data, would be a huge improvement in consumer control. On the other hand, if Google gets much more information about you on its servers, it will be able to create a clone who can seek you out and try to kill you.

We’re waiting for the option in 3-5 years where you can store your genome with Google and then see ads relevant to your genetic predispositions, ’cause you know it’s going to happen. (I wonder if Google will try to hire me now for that idea!)

Comments

Edit Your Comment

oh, this makes me nervous. generally i’m not a huge privacy freak. i don’t even shred my old bills (NOOOO!!).

i’ve been saying for years that what i want is an implant (in my arm, say) that has all my info on it. Identification, medical history, all of it. i’m (mostly) joking but in some ways i’d rather have that than have it stored on some server somewhere that will eventually get hacked.

I’m mostly for this. Having gone through the logistical nightmare of caring for my father as he became increasingly incapacitated from mini-strokes and dementia, I can appreciate what a blessing the online record system would have been. Every time I took Dad to a new provider — primary care, three neurologists, psychiatrist, gerontologist, assisted living, nursing home, three different hospitals — I’d have to fill out the same lengthy patient histories, med lists, etc etc. This was all in the space of about 18 months total. At a stressful time, it was sometimes TOO MUCH. “Why can’t these places all communicate with one another?” I wondered each time.

If you’re young and basically healthy, this topic won’t have the same resonance it does for those of us who are middle-aged and older, and/or who have a chronic medical condition ourselves or among immediate family members. There has got to be some secure way to store medical histories and current medication records! Bring it on.

I’m 29 and have had a slew of interesting health problems. Something like this would have made my life so much easier when I was going through the worst of it. Trying to get all my health info in one place is a logistical nightmare.

As for privacy, I don’t worry about it all that much. I’m sure there would be a way to blur out/remove your SSN, address or phone number. So what is someone finds out about my colonoscopy results? That’s no big deal to me.

@Electoral College Dropout: LOL! Another great use of a Simpsons quote. Seriously though, am I the only person that is appalled at the thought of my medical history being in the hands of a company that has repeatedly shown such blatant disregard for privacy?

The problem that these services face is that no doctor is going to trust a patient-curated health record. Yeah, they’ll look at it if there’s nothing else, and that’s great for emergency room patients from a different state, but it’s not something that will replace the current system to any significant degree.

I’m not just being a detractor, I love to have all my stuff online, but Yodlee doesn’t let me tell it how much money I have in my bank accounts, and no bank would trust the info if it did, so health records are the same way. People will leave in shot records and immunizations, but leave out or remove things that might be embarrassing or incriminating.

a big problem with these systems for consumers is that you cannot make your medical problems disappear. for example, say you have major surgery when you are 17. your dr. fixes you but then says to just not tell the insurance companies that you had the condition at all because “you will never get insurance again” unless it is $2k a month. with these new fancy systems, you can’t make your condition vanish (at least the paper trail) like you can with the existing system in order to get affordable health insurance.

Use and disclosure of personally-identifiable health information is governed (in the US, at least) by HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Even if Google wanted to use your health info for their own gain in any form other than as anonymous aggregate data, they legally could not.

@Greasy Thumb Guzik: That would upend our economy on its ear in a hurry. There is too much private money involved in health care and there would be too many jobs lost in the transition. Between hospitals, private surgery centers (use to work for a company that owns 160 to date), drug companies, etc. etc. etc. etc (yes, 4 required…) the upheaval of such a massive change to the system would cause the loss of more jobs than can be counted. On top of that, who do you think would run this wonderful new national single payer insurance? Our government…and really…are you masochistic?

As for hackers, do you really think that Google will be any less secure than a doctors office that spends as little as possible on computers? And security for those computers? I bet I could walk into a doctors office anywhere in the States and I could pull up patient info on anyone who has ever seen that doctor in less than a minute. The problem with HIPAA is that you legally have to secure the data but you can do it in the minimal amount of effort as it only really covers PAPER records. Computer records are not covered in the same sense…as much as I wish they were…

@theblackdog: I’d guess HIPPA would make that illegal but I don’t know what would actually prevent them from doing it. There is, after all, the medical equivalent of a credit score and they have to give up information to make that work.

While I agree that it would be a sigificant societal change (although one that I totally support), wouldn’t government control of health care likely end up with a net gain in jobs? I mean, it’s the government — efficiency isn’t exactly their strong point. Besides, private health care wouldn’t be outlawed, and why would drug companies, private surgery centers, etc. suddenly go out of business? The government need only act as an insurer, not have a monopoly on providing care or researching drugs.

The problem in the private sector of healthcare is that an immediate switch to a new system would cause them to be unable to collect and their business offices would become non-functional. This is more of a worst case scenario. As for net gain of jobs…would you rather increase the jobs where people are paid to perform or give them government jobs with healthcare where they get paid regardless…I’ll take the former as we can see at our local DMV what the latter gets you…

To add to the discussion on privacy, I seriously doubt that Google would require any personal identifying information like a name or SSN. So if Google were to sell my info to an insurance company, or a hacker breaks into my data, all they’ll know is somewhere there’s a 5’10”, 26 year old female with migraines and narcolepsy. I think I’ll be okay with that.